Provocations Revisited: How are borders and belonging framed in the digital space?

Group Submission Type: Special Session

Description of Session

Engagement with digital spaces has become synonymous with progress and modernization as well as with accessibility and anonymity. The constant “newness” of technology has become a symbol of transcending the boundaries of traditional identity markers such as nation, race, and gender among others with the belief that digital spaces can enhance global community and communication that can go beyond the local boundedness. Yet, these digital spaces, while sometimes facilitating expression of new modes of thinking and identities, also continue to reproduce the so-called old. For example, these digital spaces have become hot beds for militant nationalism, hate speech, and misinformation that have at times triggered new and other times fueled old conflicts. The response to such ambiguity and ambivalence that surrounds digital spaces is often a frantic search for new and stricter forms of regulations – or reiterates the ways in which “dominant paradigms (and) predefined concepts…exist as unquestionable (and) unchallengable.

In this session of Provocations Revisited, we pose questions on what might happen we consider the “digital” nature of the spaces that we are a part of normalizes and privileges certain forms of knowing? How we can think of states/institutions/corporations when those entities seek to manipulate digital spaces to target certain ways of thinking, knowing, and being? Finally, how do formal institutions of education critically engage with the opportunities and challenges offered by these technological advancements?

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Supriya Baily, George Mason University

Invited Speakers

• Supriya Baily, George Mason University

• Ayesha Khurshid, Florida State University

• Michael Thomas, University of Illinois at Chicago